The Giants' Dance (15 page)

‘It is the way of young men to fall prey to optimism. To prevent the battle we must first uproot the stone. And that will prove difficult here. Alas, this blighted land!'

Will looked at the black, boggy ground near the Charrel Brook and saw that Gwydion's words were undeniable. The ground Will had churned up was already glassy with water. He wondered how two men could ever hope to dig a battlestone free.

‘I fear the Charrel must have altered its course since the battlestone was buried.'

‘Maybe it was the stone that caused its course to change.'

The wizard nodded. ‘Maybe.'

Will frowned. ‘What do you think we should do?'

‘Nothing for the moment.'

‘Nothing? Not even wrap it in holding spells?'

The wizard cast him a disappointed glance. ‘With the stone still in the ground and able to draw readily on the power of the lorc? I think that would be very dangerous. My spells would not be hidden out here in the open. They would attract the wrong sort of magician.'

‘Then what?'

‘That depends on whether you think this is a stone of the greater or lesser kind.'

Will gestured uncertainly. ‘In this case I can't be sure. The moon and sun are not making the right angle with the stone for me to tell.'

The most potent time for the earth power to peak was at what Gwydion called ‘syzygy' – when the moon was full or new – or to a less extent at the time of ‘quadrature', when its disc was exactly half lit.

‘We can do nothing to alter the phase of the moon,' Gwydion said, sighing. ‘It will be best if we continue on along Indonen. Do you think you will be able to keep to its path as you have?'

‘I think so – at least for a few hours.'

‘Then point out your best guess as to where this battlestone might be. I shall fix the place in my mind.' Gwydion looked around then and his eyes fixed on the woods beyond the meadow. ‘The nearest village to this place is called Arebury. You should remember that name, for one day you shall have to return here.'

T
hey halted on a rise soon after Will lost the lign. Gwydion took them to higher ground to read the land for signs, looking for notched ridges, hidden wells and sacred groves, but also for the towers and spires of the Sightless Ones which he expected to see desecrating the ligns. He suggested Will turn his attention this way and then that, and so he did. Then Will picked up a faint clue and once more it had the sense of Indonen about it.

By now the afternoon had worn through and the evening sun was sinking red in the western skies behind a great veil of mist. The Middle Shires stretched out before them – fat, productive, comfortable. The land seemed empty of men now, through the spells that Gwydion laid to fend off inquisitive eyes, but Will saw the work of their many hands upon it. Long centuries of careful keeping had made the Realm what it was, and its form was beautiful in Will's estimation. The recent years of Duke Richard's Protectorship had allowed the land and the people to recover, and it broke his heart to think that all their gains must soon be despoiled by war.

To the south he could see a distant dark grey smudge: the town of Baneburgh. He led the wizard on during the
long twilight, vaguely following the lign, avoiding hill and hamlet, crop and cowfield. Interested sheep came to them as they passed, animals innocent of eye, friendly and more than usually expectant. They knew something was amiss with the strange power that ran under their meadow. Sheep often came to Gwydion when he appeared among them, and they did so now perhaps because the wizard carried an aura about him that seemed to them benign. It looked like love, but perhaps they had been made anxious too.

Will stared now into the reddening west, wondering at how much the lign had strengthened in so short a space of time. When they came to a hill that overlooked the village of Tysoe, they paused, then climbed it in vanishing daylight. Will went ahead up the slope. He found that two rough wooden stakes had been hammered into the ground. Each was almost as tall as he was and set twice as far apart. One was limed by the droppings of a sparrowhawk. Gwydion took an unusual interest in that, and as Will sat cross-legged and gazed into the sunset the wizard did not come to join him as Will had expected, but instead danced quiet spells around the hilltop.

The long dusk died slowly, bloodily, and with an accompaniment of complex birdsong to which Gwydion listened with care. Will drank in the full beauty of a sunset seen with an open horizon. It was a kind of beauty the Vale did not afford. Red and gold and pink and violet made the sky a vast, fiery furnace. It made him wonder about the Beyond, the realm of bright, burning nothingness that lay on the far side of the sky.

As night deepened the brighter stars began to peep out and a profound peace came over the land. Will took up the scrier's stance to prepare his mind. From small beginnings, almost unfelt and unseen, a powerful tension was revealed. In a little while the Indonen lign began to glisten in the
earth like a silvery blade picked out by moonlight. It reminded Will of that first night he had followed a stranger out of the Vale, and the stranger had touched his eyes and lit the night all around with the silver-green glow of elflight.

‘Tell me what you see now,' Gwydion said.

‘I see glimmerings very clearly,' he whispered, his voice awe-filled. ‘Indonen runs from a point on the skyline near that elm tree: I judge it to be about halfway between east and north-east. It passes below the small hill over there to the south of where the moon is rising.'

Gwydion's eyes narrowed as he committed the track to memory. ‘What else?'

Will gasped, hardly able to believe what he was seeing. ‘Yes! There's another lign. I can see it crosses Indonen. Down there!'

‘Describe it to me.'

‘It seems much fainter. A darker, more turbulent flow. Perhaps…greener.' He put his right arm out from his shoulder and sighted along it, though his eyes were now closed. ‘It comes from a place between west and north-west and runs over there to the south of Baneburgh.'

‘Is it Eburos?' That was the lign on which the Giant's Ring stood.

‘No.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Very sure. Can't you sense how different it is, Gwydion?'

But the wizard just peered into the darkness near Tysoe like a look-out peering into a dense fog. A nightjar's churring call came to them from far away. Gwydion had once taught him that hearing that sound meant the sun had been down for an hour. It was as good a clock as any. By now the moon was rising harvest gold.

‘It will set at the full at the moment of sunrise,' Gwydion said. ‘I guess that is the reason the ligns are so visible to you.'

‘They're very active,' Will said, feeling the flow strongly now. ‘The power's surging down below.'

‘I believe the second lign must be Caorthan – the lign of the rowan,' Gwydion said.

Will stared hard at the lign. It seemed to brighten even as he did so, spilling power into the swirling and spiralling earth streams that bordered it. Then Will said in wonderment, ‘Oh, Gwydion! There's a richness to it!'

The wizard came to him. ‘Then tell me what you feel.'

‘Two flows. Both rising. Both swelling with power. But something's wrong. It should be beautiful. It should make me think of moonlight and waterfalls and great forests, but it doesn't.'

Suddenly there were colours swarming everywhere in Will's mind, and a music that seemed to fill the sky. Then fire swept across the stars, a golden flame, licking and swirling and finally dying until all that was left was a depthless blue pricked by countless jewels of scattered light. And now above all rode the pain-bright whiteness of the moon, a perfect disc that blotted out the stars. His face upturned, Will bathed in the mystic shine. He lay down as the radiance pierced him, was transfixed by silver beams that nailed his flesh to the earth. And as he lay on his back he listened to the music that rose and thundered like the ocean, and filled everything under the sky. The hollows of his bones hummed, reverberating with the one great chord that connected him to everything and to everyone, so that he cried out in gladness to have so sudden and complete an understanding come to him.

Then it was as if he had come awake from a good night's sleep. He looked around and felt Gwydion's hands firm on his shoulders, shaking him gently. He was sitting cross-legged, facing east, with his back to the setting moon, waiting for the dawn. By the look of the sky, sunrise was no more than an hour away. It looked dull and grey compared to
the vivid visions that had filled his mind's eye moments ago.

‘What happened to me?' he asked, touching the dew on his arms and legs.

‘You have been inside yourself all night long. You were lulled.'

‘Lulled?'

Gwydion chuckled. ‘By the music of the lorc. What a harper you would have made, Will, had you been born in the old days. Are you feeling well? I would say you have been well and truly moonstruck.'

Will got up and walked around, but there was no need to loosen his limbs. He felt neither cold nor stiff, as he should have been after a night on the damp ground.

‘I feel…' he brushed back his braids and said dreamily, ‘…very, very well.'

‘But can you feel the
battlestone
?'

He heard patience being sorely tried, and knew Gwydion was waiting for him to regiment his thoughts. ‘Is there a stone near here?'

‘I would say so.'

‘Let me see.'

He stumbled around for a while, then they went down and approached the lign and immediately Will's feeling of wellbeing dropped away. A sick feeling of despair seized him.

Gwydion demanded, ‘Is this one a greater or a lesser stone?'

Will, wary now and fully awake, steeled himself to address the question. Finally he clenched a fist and put it to his forehead in an effort to make the answer come. ‘I think it might be weaker than the Arebury stone.'

‘Willand…' Gwydion was shaking him gently. ‘We have work to do.'

He made another effort to dispel the sickness. ‘Without
getting closer I can't say for sure. I daren't go closer. Not yet.'

‘Why not?'

‘Maybe if the moon were to set, or the sun to rise. Just now it's like trying to see into the distance on a rainy day. One day a man can look out and see a faraway hill as clear as clear, another day he won't see a thing. Maybe if we went just a little bit closer.'

Gwydion looked around carefully, then nodded. ‘If you think so.'

They skirted the place where the two earth streams crossed and, as they came abreast of it, a sudden nausea rose in the pit of Will's stomach. He was reminded very strongly of the sludgy, sucking bog into which he had stumbled the day before. He caught again the same unbearable whiff of corruption, though there was nothing here to make the air unsweet. He retched drily, staggering as he waited for Gwydion to come to him.

‘It's right here,' he said shortly. ‘Do you want to make a start?'

But Gwydion continued to look back at the hill from which they had come. He was unhappy at something. ‘We should not unearth it.'

‘You want to leave
another
one alone?' Will felt the blade of annoyance flash inside him. ‘What's the excuse this time, Gwydion?'

The wizard's gesture seemed to dismiss his anger. ‘It is perhaps too deeply buried.'

‘Gwydion, surely we must dig it up. What's the purpose of finding these monsters if we don't slay them?'

‘I think we must not slay this one until we have slayed another.'

‘What
other
? What are you talking about? You mean the one back there? The one near Arebury that we did nothing about either?' Will waited for Gwydion to answer, but the
wizard added nothing, and so Will came back at him. ‘I've been thinking about Maskull. I don't understand why he wants so much to kill me. And I don't understand why you won't tell me about him.'

The wizard circled the site of the battlestone warily, then began to dance. ‘This is not a good time or place to speak of this.'

‘Gwydion, when will you ever say it is a good time to speak of it? I want to know what's going on!'

‘You will not understand. His motives are complex.'

‘Is he evil?'

‘Not in the way that you still insist on misusing the word.'

‘Then what?'

‘He has come to believe in unkind solutions.'

‘Why did you banish him when you could have killed him?'

The wizard broke off his movements and looked at Will sharply. ‘I banished him because it is beyond me to kill him.'

‘Are you saying his power's greater than yours?'

‘That, Willand, remains to be seen.'

Will folded his arms, irked by the wizard's magical dance around the site. It seemed faintly ridiculous. ‘Surely it would have been better to imprison Maskull in plain sight rather than to exile him. For too long, you didn't know he had escaped. And now you don't know where he is at all.'

Gwydion's half-glance scorned him. ‘You speak as if I had had all the time in the world at Verlamion to have Maskull whipped and shipped to the Isle of Gulls! I have already told you, I was fortunate to be able to land any spell at all upon his person as he battled me from the curfew tower. I did not plan my action as a lasting solution. It was an emergency. You already know that such a vanishing spell always brings with it a jump in time for the one who is vanished away. I therefore knew we would be free of him
for thirteen months, at the least. And there are other considerations.'

‘There always are.' Will walked away, but as soon as he had gone two paces from the lign he saw that he was goading the wizard and could not help himself. ‘You seem to me far too cautious for this kind of work.'

‘Caution is one of the prerogatives of having lived so long, and perhaps also a reason for it.'

‘And cowardice? Is that one of your old man's vices too?'

Gwydion's eyebrow curved like the black blade of an eastern sword. ‘Now that is a failing that I will not allow.'

He continued to work his way sun-wise around the burial site as the golden disc of the morning sun sent its shadows long into the west. The wizard's gestures seemed to Will like those of some strange insect sensing the world then halting to make up its mind about what to do next. But, as suddenly as the wizard had begun, he stopped and said, ‘As for rushing madly into the draining of battlestones, Willand, it may be more dangerous than we yet know.'

‘Who understands battlestones better than I?'

Gwydion came and looked at him closely. ‘And you know
this
much!' He snapped his fingers in front of Will's face. ‘Show me the true path, Willand! Show it to me, and I will agree that you know better than I how to deal with the problem!'

‘True path? I have no knowledge of any such thing.'

‘It is, at least, something to the good that you can admit your ignorance.'

‘How can I learn when you choose to tell me so little?'

The wizard marched away from the unhallowed ground. ‘It is a rede of magic that a little knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge at all – as you so amply prove.'

‘An old man's excuses! You've done next to nothing in four years! Or so you claim! What are you hiding from me, Gwydion?'

‘You can be very tiresome when you are in the vicinity of a battlestone, Willand. At least your rudeness allows me to gauge the strength of what lies in the ground, but you should try harder to guard your mouth, for it is most irritating to listen to an uncontrolled flow of nonsense.'

‘We ought to be doing something about this evil. Quickly! Before it's too late!'

‘And I do strongly advise you that patience is a very great virtue indeed.' Gwydion made Will stand back, then he danced final magic and cast general calming spells over the earth all around the stone, but never once did he approach it.